Saltwater (2011) from Glenn-emlyn Richards on Vimeo.
A collaboration with poet Eleanor Rees. Reading by Lindsay Rodden.
You will watch this, fascinated. And you will return to the film poem and watch again, and it will seem new, as if you had not seen all of it before. Each time you do this, it will be as if you had not seen it before. Did I watch this? Yes, of course. And yet it is provoking new insights, more marvel. How does a film do that?
Between the reader, the poet, and the filmmaker artist, magic occurs. She is like Botticelli's Venus, is that why we are so transfixed? But she is an India ink figure, and not a fine Renaissance painting. The film work, the editing, brings her alive. How does her hair flow with the waves of the saltwater sea? Is it the call of the ocean itself?
Glenn-emlyn Richards had created a one of the finest film poems. I treated a group to a series of video/film poems, only a few, because they tired very quickly - poetry is demanding enough on the page, let alone strung at you in a video where you can't slow down, re-read, consider before moving on - but someone said, the one with the woman, the drawing, the ocean, that one was my favourite. In unison, they all agreed.
The animated images of the video travel like an imaginary documentary with images of the poem, but not with a photorealism. Rather we are in a world of the imagination of our world in both the poem and the film. Art on art. The way we cohere and collect our experiences in the artifice of our art presented without guile, simply.
The simplicity unravels us. We fall in love with the film poem. That one we want to keep, starred, bookmarked. But it passes away, as all things must.
And so I collect it here for you, so you may come back and journey again on the sea of Saltwater.
_
Glenn-emylin Richards, is a graphic designer, English television director, independent film-maker and musician. His films have been shown at many poetry film festivals. He currently lives in Normandy, France: wodum.co.uk/.
Eleanor Rees is an award-winning British poet and teacher of creative writing living in Liverpool. Lindsay Rodden is an Irish actress, playwright and author.
It's interesting to hear you say that videopoems are actually more demanding than poems on the page. So many people make the opposite claim, especially about animated poems -- see, for example, how the folks at Motion Poems promote their efforts to potential donors at Razoo.com:
ReplyDelete"Contemporary poetry is a mystery to most casual readers: they rarely read it, and would have a hard time discovering great new poetry on their own. We think that's a shame! So...
"MOTIONPOEMS subverts that paradigm by giving casual readers a new way to discover poetry ... as short films! That way, they can be distributed virally and on YouTube, in social networks, in classrooms, and in broadcast and film media."
In over two years of sharing videopoems, animated and otherwise, at Moving Poems, I've seen steady traffic but nothing to suggest I'm reaching very far beyond the existing fan-base for poetry. The most popular videos tend to be those for Latin American poets, in particular Vicente Huidobro and Julia de Burgos. This makes sense: poetry is actually fairly popular in the Spanish-speaking world. On YouTube and Vimeo, the most popular English-language poetry videos tend to be either those for poets who are already popular (relatively speaking), such as Billy Collins and Rumi, or for videos that make a simple point extremely well and go viral as a result, such as that text animation for a spoken-word piece by Taylor Mali about people's reluctance to express firm opinions.
I do think there's an extent to which online poems in whatever form are helping to create a slightly larger audience for poetry among those who kind of like poetry and enjoy an intellectual challenge, but may not be in the habit of sitting down to read poetry books or journals.
(Sorry about going on at such length! I should just blog this and link back.)
In my limited experience, it's the opposite. Only poets watch video/film poems with any regularity or interest. Even people in other arts, visual, music, etc., do not seem interested in the form at all. I can't even get visual artists to watch films about artists making their art in a film poem. In other words, I have and am finding a huge resistance to the form of the short video/filmpoem.
ReplyDeleteIncluding with the small group I showed film poems to on the weekend. They entered 'overload' after only about 3 film poems. It was too much to take in all at once. Writers, artists too.
I suppose at Moving Poems you have, more-or-less, cultivated an audience who understands the genre and has come to enjoy the wide variety of work being produced, and can handle the poem slipping by without being able to properly read it or understand it - and I am serious about this.
Cultivating an audience/ teaching them how to see a video/film poem was my point in discussion with John Scott on the necessity of education in this area - see the comments.
Interesting analysis. So if you're right, poets and poetry lovers are the primary audience for these films? I personally am O.K. with that, though I do share your populist impulse and your frustration that more people can't or won't make the effort to watch videopoems. But as with the writing of poems itself, I think you have to be in love with poetry to keep doing it. Making videopoetry is its own reward for me. (I did blog a slightly expanded version of my comment over at Via Neg, FWIW.)
ReplyDeleteAfter I posted I thought, no, I even find, at various sites, that poets are not that interested in watching video poetry due to the reasons I gave above. Video/film poems go by too fast. They want the option to be able to read the poems and can and have expressed frustration if the poem does not accompany the video. Most video/film poets do not include the poem. So... I always do with my work, and I subtitle now (due to requests I got from viewers in India who can read & write English perfectly but have trouble with spoken English), and recommend that everyone at least include the poem, but... it's rare to see.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure who the audiences are. The ones we've cultivated, yes, and some of the people who are making video poems - though, again, I find that even there, they don't comment on each other's work and so you don't even know if they are viewing the works of other video/film poets. Academics, yes, and bless them and their students - but again, narrowly focused courses. I'm not on the poetry film festival routes, so I don't know what happens there.
Moving Poems has a fairly large audience, doesn't it? And people are watching the video/film poems you post. Which is really fantastic. You've done and are doing a great job there. But I would say that the success of that site is because you have taught/cultivated an audience to "see" video/film poems. It's a teaching site also, not just an aggregator of 'the best on the web.'